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What Lies Beneath

Stop, wait, don’t click the play button just yet. You need to know a few things first before the rage you’re about to feel clouds your judgement about my intentions for linking today’s video lesson in evolved psychological prompts in gender dynamics. First disclaimer; this is expressly NOT an attempt to agitate any anxieties about misandry, nor is it an attempt to wantonly illustrate what I’m fairly certain is an already obvious double standard for most readers here. Second disclaimer: this isn’t about ‘women are bad, men are good’. Please spare us all the historical analysis of the evil patriarchy and how bad womyn had it under their male oppression in response to this impromptu study.

OK, click play and watch. It’s short.

My point in linking today’s video (h/t to bodybuilding.com forum) is to really come to terms with the evolved psychology and the socialization that stems from it in this. My point isn’t to start some movement to acknowledge violence against men by women, but rather to illustrate the latent reasons why it’s not addressed in the first place.

One of the foundations of the egalitarian equalism mindset is that traditional gender is a socialized set of behaviors leading to a gender identity. Equalism is based on discarding any preconceptions about innate gender identity, which is one of the primary reasons it’s proponents screech so vehemently against the ideas put forth in evo-psychology. There can be little or no room for questioning an equalist perspective in terms of the very obvious biochemical, biomechanical and ‘hard-coded’ psychology and manifest behavior of these for an equalist approach to push us towards utopia.

But science and equalism are always shocked to come home early and find Mother Nature fucking the mailman. This experiment is an excellent example of this. In the equalist’s nirvana (also see ‘girl-world’) men and women in equal measure should feel equally compelled come to both the woman’s and the poor Omega male’s defense – sadly this isn’t the case. What we’re observing here, while socially uncomfortable, is really an illustration of Darwinian principles and the evolved psychology that manifest from hundreds of thousands of years of socialization. Protect the female, leave the male to his own devices. Women are the protected sex not because of social sensibilities, but because that’s what we’re psychologically hard-wired to do.

There are intrinsic behaviors we have a natural propensity for that no one ever had to teach us. The reason a baby’s cry is so annoying to us is because we’ve evolved sensitivities to it to ensure the baby’s, and, by extension, our own species’ survival. This female protectionist dynamic is one of these intrinsic sensitivities. From either a rational or a moral perspective the social incongruities and seeming injustices of how these evolved manifestations play out are irrelevant – they are still motivated by the same evolved prompts that benefitted our species in the past. Women and children first isn’t a social dictate, it’s an evolved doctrine of survival.

Boys Don’t Cry

First example: have a read and listen to audio from The Rush here. Even when the circumstances publicly, empirically, prove a woman’s duplicity, our first primal impulse is to console a crying woman. A weeping woman intrinsically engenders prompts for protectionism. This is why crying is a default behavior for women, and one that takes a mental effort for them to prevent. Even when we listen to this we have to struggle to keep this woman’s behaviors in perspective in light of her emotional response and the effect it has on our own emotional state. Not so for a man; in fact publicly humiliating men is a sport in today’s media, why? Because we lack that visceral affinity for the masculine. A man crying will never prompt protectionistic instincts – in fact quite the opposite. We have to make a mental effort against our initial, natural, impulses to objectively come to any kind of feelings of sympathy with men, or to deal judiciously with women. In other words, it takes practice to think and feel in counterintuitive ways.

War Brides

War Brides was a seminal post for me in that it brought to light the primal undercurrent of women’s survival instincts and the legacy behaviors that have been socially accounted for in our current society. Rational reader Jim left me a poignant response in the Mrs. Hyde essay that further proved a point.

two books by John Costello; ‘Virtue Under Fire’ and ‘Love, Sex, and War’ in which all too much of the above female psychology manifested itself;

“Of the 5.3 million British infants delivered between 1939 and 1945, over a third were illegitimate – and this wartime phenomenon was not confined to any one section of society. The babies that were born out-of-wedlock belonged to every age group of mother, concluded one social researcher:

Some were adolescent girls who had drifted away from homes which offered neither guidance nor warmth and security. Still others were women with husbands on war service, who had been unable to bear the loneliness of separation. There were decent and serious, superficial and flighty, irresponsible and incorrigible girls among them. There were some who had formed serious attachments and hoped to marry. There were others who had a single lapse, often under the influence of drink. There were, too, the ‘good-time girls’ who thrived on the presence of well-paid servicemen from overseas, and semi-prostitutes with little moral restraint. But for the war many of these girls, whatever their type, would never have had illegitimate children. (pp. 276-277)”

and;

“Neither British nor American statistics, which indicate that wartime promiscuity reached its peak in the final stages of the war, take account of the number of irregularly conceived pregnancies that were terminated illegally. Abortionists appear to have been in great demand during the war. One official British estimate suggests that one in five of all pregnancies was ended in this way, and the equivalent rate for the United States indicates that the total number of abortions for the war years could well have been over a million.

These projections are at best merely a hypothetical barometer of World War II’s tremendous stimulus to extra-marital sexual activity. The highest recorded rate of illegitimate births was not among teenage girls, as might have been expected. Both British and American records indicate that women between twenty and thirty gave birth to nearly double the number of pre-war illegitimate children. Since it appears that the more mature women were the ones most encouraged by the relaxed morals of wartime to ‘enjoy’ themselves, it may be surmised that considerations of fidelity were no great restraint on the urge of the older married woman to participate in the general rise in wartime sexual promiscuity. (pp. 277-278)”

Nor, did this behavior stop with the end of WWII, it was merely rationalized, codified, and approved by society by feminism and their Vichy males.

So much for the Greatest Generation. Here we have some very damning statistics about an otherwise romanticized generation. Again, the scope of this essay isn’t to condemn women’s duplicity, but rather to see the method behind it. Socially we can make workarounds that will turn all of these stats into virtues, but underneath all that is the fact that women will do whatever their hard-coded psychologies necessitate to ensure their survival. Hypergamy is a selected-for survival mechanism.

Survival in the Pack

In the manosphere a lot has been made in comparison about an alpha / beta dynamic in human behavior, but I think in focusing on similarities in primate social structures we neglect to see the pack mentality that is also prevalent in human nature. One of my passions is reconditioning retired racing Greyhounds. There is a peculiarity of this otherwise gentle breed in that they are prone to viciously kill other Greys who display behavioral cues that imply weakness, pain or disability. When an injured Grey yelps or cries from pain on the race track (or in a group setting) it’s not usually the broken leg that kills the dog, it’s the other 7 dogs piling on to tear it apart. This behavior takes a lot of people by surprise because it’s entirely incongruent with the nature of one of the most passive breeds of dog, but in their primal past a yelping dog could give the pack away to prey or otherwise endanger the collective. That yelping became the trigger cue for killing that member of the pack. It may have been a species survival trait in the evolutionary past, but now it’s a liability for the animal.

As social animals, humans are also subject to legacy behaviors from our own evolutionary past. In a normal social context it’s curious in that most men (and women) would willingly cooperate to achieve a common goal. Men will come to the aid of one another when one is attacked. However when a man is beaten or berated by a woman, the behavior is the opposite. That particular prompt does not engender an impulse to come to the man’s defense. In fact there’s almost a revulsion to the act. Why? Perhaps it’s a legacy survival instinct that allows for that member of the pack to be ‘weeded’ from the whole?

31 comments

My BPD ex-wife attacked me 3 times over the last 4 weeks of our marriage. The last time she did, the neighbors called the cops, who refused to arrest her and asked me questions non-stop, even though I recorded the entire final altercation on my cell phone.

I wish people talked about males who get beaten up by females — I know from talking to plenty of now-alpha guys that it’s not a rare occurrence, but it seems like guys are afraid or ashamed to bring it up.

That being said, I was absolutely at my worst beta in my entire adulthood leading up to her abuse. I know the signs of BPD pretty well now, but if a woman ever raised her hand or voice to me, she’d be NEXT! before she would ever have a chance to challenge me physically.

It’s also no surprise that “society” doesn’t challenge these “frail and weak” women when they’re abusing their “strong and masculine” men.

If this won’t knock her off her pedestal, nothing will. A chilling view into women’s darker natures.

1. Women can have abortions and cover up the pain for years.
2. Women can dump a man after years of sex and/or marriage, and be completely fine with it in a matter of days. Roissy said it: When the love is gone, she can be as cold to you as if she had never known you.
3. Women can dump a man cold if she thinks she can trade up.
4. A woman will marry a beta and cuckold him with an alpha, then dupe the beta into thinking the child is his, and rationalize it all.
5. A woman will sex up an alpha knowing it is just sex and knowing full well she’ll probably get pumped and dumped.
6. Given the right circumstances, the right man, the right time and the ability to evade detection, many women — even many married women — will cheat with no moral compunction about it.

I’ve never understood what’s going on in a woman’s head when it comes to abusing a man. There seems to be such a diversity of desires and motivations for them, whereas men usually fight for the same reason in most situations, and that’s a reason that we as a species don’t allow aimed against women very often. Maybe people are instinctively, subconsciously aware of this? I don’t know but it’s possible.

I remember about 10 years back when my (now) wife and I moved in together for the first time, well before getting engaged. For the first few weeks it seemed like she constantly challenged me physically, with almost any dispute resulting in her wanting to fight. She hadn’t been like that in the two years I knew her before moving in.

At first I responded in the usual male way, sort of like the actor in the video and not reacting much at all. Then eventually I got pretty fed up with it all, warning her verbally after days of this nonsense. It would get her to back off temporarily, but never permanently. Finally, after several weeks of her violence, punching, slapping, biting, grappling and kicking, I’d had enough. I was seriously considering kicking her to the curb despite her lack of history of ever doing this before, though as a young man I’d still assumed there had to have been something I’d done to cause it. But one night she came at me as usual, announcing as always, she “wanted to fight” with this borderline crazed look in her eye.

For some reason, I didn’t get the rush of adrenaline and the tightening of my body that usually happened when she did that. Instead I just relaxed, cleared my mind, and went to work on her. I didn’t hit or anything, but wrestled her down completely, flipped her head down and legs up, got complete control of her and immobilized her. Once I had her down pinned to the ground, I remembered at the time that I’d read in the Godfather (book) that if you want to beat a woman, there was a way to do it that left no marks on her. I used that method then, but only had to for a few moments when she went totally limp, looked me in the eye and apologized in a way she never had before and never since. She really went to town on me later that night in bed, multiple anything/everything I wanted until I had to get up for work.

I never got why she did that or what compelled her. She didn’t either, though she’s said in the years since that she’d done that with every boyfriend she had gotten serious with and the ones who always knuckled under and took her beatings were the ones she’d dumped quickly after. I guess my (partial) resistance early on and my total conquest that night kept that from happening. She went back to complete sweetness and light after that night, and we’ve never fought physically since. Who knows why women do this kind of stuff, but it isn’t for the same reasons men do, and our legal system of course doesn’t account for any of this complexity.

Dated a woman a while ago that would try to hit me – she enjoyed the rough stuff – I would grab her wrists get them in one hand, bend her over my knee, pull down her pants and shine her butt to a nice apple red. That would get her hot enough to go for hours. Tying her to the bed spread-eagle was an added bonus.

My point is that I have found that with most women, they are looking for the same thing done back to them. She could hit me full force and probably break her hand, but she would do the little balled fists, acting like a little girl, not really a threat. A LOT of women who are into the rough stuff give hints to what turns them on when they don’t want to come out and show that they enjoy the kinky stuff.

It just goes to the old, never believe what a woman says – take your lessons from what she does. It will tell you what she needs.

Heck one of the younger ones not that long ago tried to choke me – like she had enough strength. So I figured she was into that, and choked her as we had sex. She came like a freight-train before going unconscious. (Checked to be sure she was okay, then went to bed with her.) The next morning, I wake up to the smell of bacon. Interesting since I eat out a lot so have little in the way of breakfast in my refrigerator. I wander down stairs – she’s in one of my shirt making me breakfast – happy as a little kitten, and just as adorable. She had gone out to get everything for breakfast – which meant she walked about a mile to get things since she didn’t have a car at my place.

So, my experience is that women go for the rough stuff to tell you what gets them off, and they aren’t really looking to have their clocks cleaned, or do serious harm. Of course if they try to hit you with something that can do serious damage – unload on her and that will stop it. I mean, she has 1/3 of your upper body strength – so it would be like controlling a child.

Awhile back I was dating this crazy stripper girl and I was banging her missionary style when she hauled off and slapped me.

Well, two can play that game so I slapped her back. We went back and forth for awhile. She seemed to enjoy having me forcibly hold her hands down so she would have a hard time hitting me. That was a first for me.

The next day she was a little concerned that she might have had some marks on her face (she didn’t) but other than that her only reaction was “Well, that was fun.”

As for the choking thing, I have never met a girl who didn’t at least like to have a firm hand on her throat while she was getting fucked. Never taken it beyond that but I can pretty much guarantee I could have with most of them.

Well I’m 35 now and read the book in high school, so it was easily remembered 10 years ago but not so much now. You can obviously check this out for yourself, but as I recall the section of the book dealt with the new brother-in-law beating the sister. But basically Sonny goes easy on the bil the first time because no marks had been left on the sis, and the bil tells his pal later that it was because he knew how to beat her without leaving marks. It involved beating her with either a folded belt or the side of his hand while targeting her hips, neither higher nor lower because the back, sides and thighs will show bruising much more easily. The next time he didn’t use this method and paid the price when the marks were spotted. It actually makes more sense than the movie which shows the bil beat her like a red-headed stepchild, considering she was a Corleone.

Interesting post which is very real in todays society, this should be seen as horrific no matter what gender. One of my last ex girlfriends i dated a few years ago used to punch etc but i have no idea why she would think this kind of behavior is acceptable to begin with. Its also sad to see people stand around watching others receive this kind of abuse, the guy on that bench was minding his own business half the time yet people seem to make him out to be the one doing everything wrong. In that retrospect i have seen women get away with smacking guys in front of cops/bouncers.

In reality if i was harassed like that i would of probably pushed her away if she kept doing it. is that wrong? Imo no, its my space, even better i would of walked away and called the cops. Use self defense where necessary lol.

Let the EGO take you over and you are doomed to this kind of behavior. The real people don’t hit or abuse they just sit and talk it out.

Sometimes you just have to accept some of these people are messed up and move on, let them make their own mistakes. Women are women but they are also people, there are plenty of women that are good girls and plenty that are willing to be taught and be lead the right way by their partner. Just avoid the crazy people who don’t change, that should then be enough motivation for them to change them self.

Hey Rollo,
Any chance you would write a post on female control freaks. Just had a bad burning by one, lesson learned. Next. The insatiatable need to control everthing/everyone around them, Must stem from a pretty dark place in side. The endless power plays is a game you will never win, unless you just became afc.

Very nice post, sir. Indeed evolutionary psychology can explain most of the social phenomena. And yes, this part of science was ostracized in post WW2 years, trying to promote nurture above nature and therefore socialist dream of equality. Nice documentary about this is BBC documentary:
It is worth watching….whole 12 parts.

It is also true that with prosperity and freedom many people and especially(?) women behave like mad. Boom in divorce, consumerism, substance abuse, wh0ring. Their prehistoric instincts on loose.

Solution however can’t be in stricter regulation by law or social pressure in form of peer or religious pressure. Sharia is not an answer only inefficient post pone at best.

We have to evolve out of this. Surely less children is born in the prosperous and free west/north and children of divorced parents are handicapped. Survival of the fittest in play?

Most of the impulses connected with that prehistoric part of brain of ours are imo mainly primitive outdated survival instincts suitable for small children only. When you study the Alpha Male phenomena you eventually come to conclusion, there is no place for this impulses in his arsenal. Alpha is a poster boy for ‘not being driven by primitive emotions’. For most of them come from fear and manifest in the Ego. Fear of rejection, approval seeking, greed, lust etc. The greatest men were free of ego – primitive survival knee jerk. Marcus Aurelius as an example. Or think Gladiator.

We should certainly try and evolve in more reasonable creature. Many men took the wrong route and tried to de-evolve to model the only example they see – women (guilt ridden emotional Nice Metro Guy). Surely a dead end.

Women also have to try and evolve to more reasonable, less ego driven creatures. Knowing what is ego and what it tries to tell you certainly helps – that inner voice demanding respect, love and trying to be special. It lives out of drama, hides behind pain and tries to tell you it is your bff or even you.

Dominance, control and even BDSM fetish is deep in every woman. It is a taboo, because of not giving any funny ideas to rapists – guys who think women will love them, because they like it rough. Sadistic deviants rapists are another story – taboos like this are just an excuse at best.

Google ‘ top 10 female sexual fantasies’. Rape, sex with stranger, exhibition, humiliation…. It is important to realize it is just a fantasy, in most cases they know the reality would not be that enjoyable and leave it at that.

Another aspect, especially with small children…it can be called ‘Does he love me no matter what’ Test. Kid slaps you for no good reason just to make sure you love her and won’t throw her to the bush once wolves come. Also attention seeking, plays a role.

I’m continually amazed at the sheer quality of the writing here in the manosphere, particularly on sites like this. Your articles are insightful, provocative, and above all, clear. In a world that was not broken, men like you, Rollo, would be writing columns in Time Magazine or the New York Times.

To me, it looks just like another case of people ignoring someone else’s business so that they don’t get in trouble.

We had just the same act in my country on some show where a husband actor was grabbing and yelling at his wife actress:
Both male and female passers-by ignored them equally. some guy even walked right between the couple. when asked later by the filming crew why he didn’t intervene he said “some girls just like this from their husbands”

A few more ideas on possible evolutionary explanation of the phenomenon:

– Potential damage. A man abusing a women may turn into seriously hurting her, or possibly rape. Both are obviously BAD things. If a man is abused by a (single) woman the damage is mostly psychological, and there is no potential for rape. Much less reason to intervene.

– Incentives. A man will definitely feel motivated to help a woman. This could give him a shot at her and/or make him look like a dependable protector in front of the other women around. A woman will protect another woman out of simple empathy. It’s too easy to imagine how it would be in her place.
When a man is abused I can’t see any strategic advantage to helping him. Like Rollo said in the end of the article, he’s most likely “low quality”, and there’s little benefits in helping him, or even associating with him.

Well, I may be wrong here as I don’t have numbers, but women raping men is a much rare event. I’d wager it’s at least a couple of orders of magnitude lower then men raping women.

Second, rape has long term psychological effects on a woman. Socially and biologically it’s a very harmful event, with consequences varying from unwanted pregnancy to ruining her marrigeability. For men it’s akin to plain sexual abuse. Harmful, but without the same long term effects.

For one, there’s a whole literature on male rape that shows it is much more prevalent than many people believe. Indeed, one of the reasons it is thought to be rare is that many criminal codes basically define it out of existence. See for instance the new FBI definition of rape which finally allows for the rape of a man IF he is forcibly penetrated – but does not count being FORCED to penetrate as rape. In short , if she puts a gun to your head and a device in your mouth or anus -rape. If she puts a gun to your head and says “put it in or die”, congratulations – you have NOT been raped. Now the FBI is categorizing things. This categorization leads to statistics and thus part of the disparity between the number of rapes male -vs-female is due to this sort of thing. Now some states do recognize forced envelopment as rape, but others do not do so. In many states, if you are not penetrated, you may be sexually assaulted, but you are not raped, even though rape is supposedly coerced sex.
British law is similar in that rape is defined by statute to be solely the act of penetration.
As for incidence, studies are all over the place, with the places of greatest threat to men being prison and to women being the home or on a date. Stranger rape is considered rather rare for both sexes, though admittedly much less rare for women than for men. Men, however, are in much greater danger than women of repeated rape due to the relative proportion of men in prison vs women in prison.

Psychologically? I don’t even know if that can be measured. I do know that male and female survivors of rape have various reactions with some of both sexes being severely traumatized and some of both sexes apparently able to shrug it off. So it is a bit silly of you to pretend that all rape survivors of whatever sex behave the same when any simple google search would show you that is not so.

“Dominance, control and even BDSM fetish is deep in every woman. It is a taboo, because of not giving any funny ideas to rapists – guys who think women will love them, because they like it rough. Sadistic deviants rapists are another story – taboos like this are just an excuse at best.

Google ‘ top 10 female sexual fantasies’. Rape, sex with stranger, exhibition, humiliation…. It is important to realize it is just a fantasy, in most cases they know the reality would not be that enjoyable and leave it at that.”

top 10 female sexual fantasies of which particular demographic or demographics of women? American? Canadian? British? Western European? That’s believable.

South Asian? African? Middle Eastern? I doubt it.

The problem with most “studies” like these is that they are done on North Americans, Brits and sometimes Australians and Western Europeans. They are highly culturally dependent.